Ramping Your Brand

How to Ride the Killer CPG Growth Curve

By: James F. Richardson

Narrated by: Dr. James F. Richardson

Length: 5 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

"I wish I'd had this book 20 years ago." (John Foraker, CEO of Once upon a Farm, former CEO of Annie's Homegrown)

"I wish I'd read this book before coaching teams with CPG startups." (Tom Eisenmann, Howard H. Stevenson professor of business administration, Harvard Business School)

"This book provides an excellent framework for building a consumer brand in the 2020s." (Mike Mauze, general partner of VMG Partners)

Do you want exponential growth? In this book, Dr. James Richardson outlines a four-part approach to thinking smarter about growth as a CPG entrepreneur. It is based on years of anthropological research into how and why consumers pay for premium-priced CPG items and intensive 4P pattern analysis among an elite club of premium CPG brands that all reached $100M+ in less than a decade.

Part one - Designing to Command a Premium: This is where many founders fail without realizing it. There is a cultural logic behind premium products that grow extremely fast. You should learn it.

Part two - Managing a Small Experiment: Don’t hit the gas too early. Successful CPG startups manage a rolling, iterative experiment until key KPIs appear. You should learn this art.

Part three - Fine Tuning the Conversion Playbook: Steady velocity growth is essential to ramping your brand. Your team needs to learn the art of sustaining it in key geographies so that you don’t have to buy premature distribution to obtain growth.

Part four - Accelerating to Scale: There are three best practices in acceleration. Two of them are counterintuitive to CPG veterans without expertise in the ramping of premium CPG businesses. You need to learn how to deploy them.

©2019 James F. Richardson (P)2021 James F. Richardson

Great info read by a Disney villain

I cannot imagine this guy talks like this in real life. He’d be the weirdest dude you ever met if he does. He seriously reads the book like some kind of Disney cartoon character and makes lots of snide and condescending comments about every person from consumers to entrepreneurs. He clearly is the kind of guy who thinks he’s the smartest guy in every room by leaps and bounds causing him to look down on just about everyone and have a total lack of awareness of how he comes off to others.
The way he reads his book is so distracting it’s making it very hard to absorb the information. But looking through the other reviews I guess it’s clear his weird postering and over exaggerated guffaws, sneers, and sarcasm appeals to a certain kind of white dude with a high opinion of himself and delusions of grandeur in business. I wish I had just read the physical book because my annoyance at this dudes gross personality is ruining what is probably a lot of great info.

Simples mas não fácil

Tenho uma empresa neste segmento e estou aplicando os ensinamentos da maneira que entendi. Parece estar funcionando… fase 1 ON!
I hope I don’t fall on my ass very soon.
I will be back here on each fase end.🙏🏽😉

Required reading for F&B CPG founders

James Richardson put together an absolute gem
of information on food and bev CPG with Ramping Your Brand. Really wish myself & partners had become familiar with every page of this book before creating our company.

He’s a brilliant mind & sees the objective truths and derivatives of the space that many fail to miss.

Super awesome book, Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

A Must Read for Premium CPG Brand Founders

A Must Read for Premium CPG Brand Founders. Walks you through the dos and don'ts of launching and growing.

Straight up, Informative

The author is very straightforward, doesn't soften things. Which, in my opinion is great.

He tells you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear.

He provides information on different stages of growth for CPG companies.

This is the best and most well rounded CPG focused book I have read so far. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested or currently a part of the CPG industry.

Definetly worth listening to 2 or 3 times. he covers a lot of ground.

Amazing performance

I found the information in this book to be applicable for my CPG business even though it is outside of food and beverage. The real win on this goes to the dr. James Richardson and his lively reading of what could otherwise be dry material. I found the reading reminiscent of a bestselling sci-fi rather than your typical business audiobook,

Excellent perspective

Dr James dissects the CPG industry at a level which is severely lacking in a world of data analysis paralysis. He looks at it from a humanistic perspective, with data support, to demonstrate why the sales process starts in the consumers’ home and NOT in test kitchens or board rooms.

Good reading- a bit too sarcastic for me

Great performance, some gems . Overall would recommend. Sometimes sounds too harsh and some statements sound a bit shallow, lack some important background detail. You are lucky if you know people and growth drivers that stand behind featured brands, otherwise you might end with wrong conclusions.

Invaluable resource

If you have aspirations for building a food brand or are already doing so this book is far, far more than the Audible you use to pay for it. Dr Richardson provides a depth of understanding within this space that I haven’t encountered in my 6 years trying to build a brand. I wish I had found it sooner and I highly recommend it.

Extremely valuable content delivered with some humor

If this content is relevant to you, purchase this ASAP. I saw comments of others who didn’t enjoy the performance. I felt quite the opposite. In fact, I’ve never felt compelled to comment on performance before. The narrator added a lot of fun and memorability to this title.